Sara Bareilles

Out of Eureka

Sara Bareilles was born on 7 December 1979 in Eureka, a lumber and fishing town on California's far north coast, a long way from the industry she would later join. She studied communication studies at UCLA, where the a cappella group Awaken gave her the first audience for her own songs, and she put out a self-released collection, Careful Confessions, in 2004 while playing club dates around Los Angeles.

Epic Records signed her on 15 April 2005. The album that followed, Little Voice, arrived in 2007 and climbed to number seven on the Billboard 200 on the strength of 'Love Song', a piano-pop single written as a pointed answer to a label's request for something more commercial. The joke landed: the song earned her Grammy nominations for Song of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 2009 and remains the first thing most audiences shout for.

Kaleidoscope Heart, in 2010, debuted at number one. The Blessed Unrest followed in 2013 and produced 'Brave', the second of her songs to outgrow her and become a stadium sing-along, a graduation anthem and a campaign tune. By the middle of the decade she had three big pop records, a settled band and a reputation as one of the few mainstream singers who wrote everything at the keyboard herself.

The Broadway detour that became a second career

In 2015 she released What's Inside: Songs from Waitress, a set of songs she had written for a stage adaptation of the Adrienne Shelly film. Waitress opened on Broadway on 25 March 2016 and brought her a Tony nomination for Best Original Score. When the show needed a draw, she stepped into the lead role of Jenna herself for limited runs between 2017 and 2019 and again in 2021, and the production reached the West End on 27 January 2020. A second score, for the SpongeBob SquarePants musical, earned another Tony nomination in 2018.

Amidst the Chaos, released in 2019, debuted at number six and won her a Grammy in 2020 for Best American Roots Performance, her first win after years of nominations. Then the acting took over. Little Voice, a series she created with J.J. Abrams, premiered on Apple TV+ on 10 July 2020. She played Dawn Solano, the lead in the comedy Girls5eva, from 2021 to 2024, first on Peacock and later on Netflix. In May 2022 she was the Baker's Wife in the Encores! staging of Into the Woods, then carried the role into the Broadway revival until 4 September 2022 and picked up a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical.

The upshot is that a generation of theatregoers know her before they know the pop records, and a generation of pop fans know her from the radio and have never seen her on a stage. The 2026 tour is the first time in seven years that both groups get the same show.

Good Grief: seven years, two funerals and a six-day recording session

The new album was announced on 3 June 2026 alongside its lead single, 'Home', and released by Epic on 28 August. It is her seventh studio record and her first since 2019. Bareilles has described the songs as feeling 'like transmissions rather than a deliberate attempt to make sense of the world', adding that her 'deepest hope is that Good Grief provides some kind of comfort or catharsis'.

The grief is specific. Chad Joseph, her college best friend and long-time manager, died in 2020, and 'Just a Kid' addresses him in plain, conversational lyrics. Gavin Creel, who played opposite her in both Waitress and Into the Woods, died in 2024. 'Ladies in a Line' deals with infertility and the clinical grind of fertility treatment, an experience she shares with a member of her band. Two other tracks, 'Hands off My Body' and 'Capsize Me', lean on group harmonies and massed voices rather than a solo at the piano.

The record was cut in six days in a studio in upstate New York, and a camera was in the room throughout. The resulting fly-on-the-wall documentary, Sara Bareilles: Good Grief, directed by Josh Alexander and stitched together with her own self-taped footage, premiered at the Beacon Theatre in New York ahead of the album. Reviewing both together for The Arts Fuse on 27 August 2026, Melissa Rodman called the film 'sleepier' than recent pop-music spectacles and 'complementary to the album, not the main attraction', while praising the communal way the record was made.

The release itself was treated as a public event rather than a listening party. From 28 to 30 August, Lincoln Center Theater's Christopher Lightfoot Walker Lobby hosted a free three-day installation built from handwritten anonymous accounts of loss collected by The Strangers Project since 2009, audio recordings of fans describing their own grief, and a Steinway Spirio player piano running pre-recorded Bareilles performances through the day. She played live once each afternoon or evening. In her private life the period has been less bleak: she married the actor Joe Tippett on 4 October 2025, a decade after they met during the Waitress out-of-town tryout in August 2015.

The Good Grief Tour, from Fenway to Seattle

The tour was announced with the album in early June 2026 and went on general sale on 10 June. It is a theatre run rather than an arena run: 17 stops in the United States and Canada, opening at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston on 9 September, with a second Boston night added on 10 September, and closing at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle on 19 October. In between come The Anthem in Washington, Massey Hall in Toronto on 15 September, Radio City Music Hall on 18 September, The Met in Philadelphia, the Fox in Atlanta, the Taft in Cincinnati, the Chicago Theatre on 27 September, the Orpheum in Minneapolis, the Stifel in St. Louis, the Bellco in Denver, Bass Concert Hall in Austin, the Hobby Center in Houston, two nights at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on 12 and 13 October, and the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.

Live Nation is producing, and the ticketing carries a charitable rider that fits the subject matter: through the PLUS1 scheme one dollar from every ticket goes to The Jed Foundation, which works on young people's emotional health, and all net proceeds from the VIP upgrade packages go to NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. None of the announcements so far name a support act.

She warmed up with two short outings before the run: an eight-song set at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state on 30 May 2026 for the Echoes Through the Canyon festival, and five songs at the Beacon Theatre on 4 June.

What the room gets now

The Boston opener on 9 September ran from 8.40pm to 10.40pm, two hours on the nose, with doors at 7pm and 21 songs. She started with the new record, 'Home', 'Still Crying' and 'Just a Kid' back to back, and played almost all of Good Grief across the night, leaving out only 'Say Leave' and 'Wind is the Weather'. The older material was folded in rather than saved for a greatest-hits block: 'Hands Off My Body' was run into 'Saint Honesty' and 'Capsize Me' into 'Many the Miles', pairing new songs with catalogue cuts the hardcore fans know. The middle of the set held 'Gravity' and a cover of Whitney Houston's 'I Wanna Dance with Somebody', then the run of 'Love Song', 'Uncharted', 'King of Anything' and 'Brave', followed by 'She Used to Be Mine' from Waitress, before 'Salt Then Sour Then Sweet' and 'Let the Rain' closed the night.

At the time of writing, published critical reviews of the tour itself have not yet appeared; the only detailed account of opening night is a setlist report published on 10 September, and the second Boston date and the Washington shows were still ahead. What can be said is where she stands: a songwriter with a number-one album, a Grammy, three Tony nominations, a lead role on a Netflix comedy and a Broadway revival behind her, who has chosen to return with a record about dead friends and failed fertility treatment, and to play it nearly in full to theatres of two or three thousand people a night. The old singles are still in the show, but they are no longer what the show is for.